


Longing to linger till dawn

by softgrungeprophet



Category: Venom (Comics)
Genre: Abandonment, Consent Issues, Exposition, Fear, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Memories, Metaphors, Other, Past Torture, Religious Content, Repentance, Repression, Self-Hatred, Self-Reflection, Unhealthy Relationships, also some brief drowning imagery, i don't want to undertag but overtagging isn't necessarily useful either, less of a scene and more of a line, symbiote suppressant drugs, there's a scene that could be considered referenced child abuse but i'm not... sure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-28 12:32:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17183063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softgrungeprophet/pseuds/softgrungeprophet
Summary: From loathe to love at full bore.





	1. the story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kitausuret](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitausuret/gifts).



> [Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6TmogXhOZ8)  
> [Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6TmogXhOZ8)  
> [But in your dreams whatever they be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6TmogXhOZ8)  
> [Dream a little dream of me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6TmogXhOZ8)  
>  
> 
>  
> 
> PLEASE let me know if I need to add a tag or warning.  
> There's not much that I would consider particularly graphic or explicit in this (for the most part) but it still... brings up some of the heavier shit that Eddie's been through in his life and contextualizes some other stuff, so like.  
> Just a heads-up.
> 
> And despite my use of a love song for the title it is decidedly un-romantic.
> 
> Kitausuret suggested I should write about what could have possibly happened between the cancer arc and Costa's 2016 run to make Eddie go from hatred to love for the symbiote. I'm still not entirely sure I succeeded in what I set out to do but I got SOMETHING lmfao

When the symbiote tried to re-bond with him after Anti-Venom, he had recoiled. In fear, self-loathing, repentance.

It had _abandoned_ him. (He had abandoned it.)

Deep in the back of his mind, he missed it.

He should have died. He _would_ have died. That he did _not_ die, even when he imposed death upon himself over the internal creep of terminal illness, over and over, was some cross between a miracle and divine cruelty. Undeserved, if an act of kindness, and wholly earned if an act of punishment. For all the selfish things he had done, the people he had hurt, the people he had tried and failed to harm, and for every person he had let die.

So he repented in the glaring white-and-black of rebirth and mourning. Life and death.

He saved people.

His salvation whittled itself away.

The symbiote touched him and he rejected it in in a wash of terror and desire and all-consuming panic.

Remembering all the things it had said, all the little seeds it had planted in his metaphorical mental garden, which he then tended and grew.

He hunted the others. Did not give them the chance to make right, did not care if they _did_ make right, if they deserved it, if they didn't. No judgment calls, only eradication. Dangerous, insidious, monstrous intracubi who he could not allow to live, no matter how they looked at him, no matter the supposed good they may have done with their hosts.

(With a clearer mind, he knew that he had hunted innocents.)

And then he found himself captured, not for the first time.

Stripped and bound; again, not for the first time.

He could not call it anything but what it was: violation.

Holistically so, from every nerve ending to every fold of brain tissue, to every neuroreceptor. Veins, arteries, bloodstream, cellular structure. A new voice in his head, unfamiliar and clever and harsh, picking apart every thought that passed through his head with the callous curiosity of a child and the tenacious pity of a stranger.

Toxin fed on his fear and hatred, his deeply-rooted resentment, his anger. Adrenaline and violence. Together they were used as a tool to hunt Flash Thompson, and together they might have succeeded but truly... they never had a chance. Technique over instinct, finely honed skill over animalistic power. Toxin and Eddie warred with each other as much as they sought to destroy Agent Venom, and it showed—

And he had felt Thompson's hands on their body, pulling. That painful rip and tear of unwilling separation, into a breath of solitude and emptiness and then—

Eddie couldn't bring himself to approach open flames anymore. A candle, maybe, but not fireplaces or campfires and certainly nothing larger. Not that most humans would be willing to brave anything larger than a beachfront bonfire, or a distant funerary pyre. But even using a lighter made his heart skip, sometimes.

The next time Eddie Brock saw Flash Thompson, he was a civilian. Mostly. They had tracked him, with Toxin's abilities and Eddie's obsessive determination. With both of their incredible stubbornness.

And they found him.

Once, twice.

They had planned to kill him, each time they met him, but each time something got in the way.

Morality? Guilt?

The thing was... they worked well together. They'd worked well together before, too. But it became more apparent, later, as he wandered Philadelphia. After the incident at the high school.

He got the feeling he'd never need to intervene, that Flash would never lose control, even having quit the tranquilizing drugs. With those track marks up his arm and that stubborn look in his eye.

He was just that kind of man.

Eddie grew accustomed to Toxin, and grew distant from his fear. He resented the Crime Master's men more than he resented the young symbiote itself. It filled his brain with red and blue stars, and more importantly, it asked him questions upon questions upon questions like a _child_ , and the more he answered the more Toxin asked. Explaining English grammar and why he liked writing with ballpoint pens instead of pencils, and homelessness and capitalism and the ins and outs of journalism and as much as he could muster about subjects he had less firsthand experience with.

He felt the low whine of betrayal pressed against the back of his skull when he let the FBI put Toxin under.

Drowning them in the flow of suppressants and chemical lobotomy, like holding a child's head down under the water.

For all Toxin's sharp edges, for all that their first meeting had run his blood cold (and sometimes still popped up in the backgrounds of his nightmares)... he hated himself.

_Every day I ask God for His forgiveness. Every day, He doesn't answer._

That girl... She was good.

Wise.

Maybe some selfish part of him hoped she could do something with Toxin... So he wouldn't have to. That part of him that pushed off the blame, pushed off the responsibilities, pushed off everything until he could push it off no longer and—

A week later, after this girl, this child, burned bright in her shining armor with her glittering wings—

Eddie stared up into the washed out night sky, from the roof of his apartment building in New York, too uncomfortable in the newly furnished studio to stay inside, and he thought about the words he had spoken to her.

 _Venom didn't make Eddie Brock a bastard_.

He'd done it his damn self, under the eye of God and the Universe.

They had been through so much together. Highs and lows. Paranoia and vengeful euphoria. Captured and tortured and experimented on and used, both of them, by each other, by other people. Those phantoms in dark alleyways, those needles and scalpels, those invasive hands. (Their own spinning thoughts.)

Only one of those many men had ever mentioned the chemical imbalances and deficiencies in his brain.

And that had made so much sense.

He lifted his arms. Looked at the smooth, unbroken stretches of skin from wrist to elbow on each. Considered the ghosts of scars never quite fully erased, a persistent itch beneath his skin on bad days.

One: the pistol.

(After one but before two, unacted upon: the consideration of another attempt, before reunion and miscarriage, before he abandoned it just as it had abandoned him. What had he expected? What could he have expected? Leading up to...)

Two: the razor.

Three: so many shards of broken glass between his fingers. The open air at his back.

Each a failure and a reminder.

He thought back to sitting together in the sewers, one of those shiny, satiny heart-shaped boxes in hand as they stuffed their face with Valentine's chocolate.

Possibly the happiest he'd ever been.

Strange to compare those days to the ones where the symbiote spoke to him with such condescension and clarity. Such superiority. Such disgust. Such possession.

A siren wailed in the distance. He couldn't see the stars, just the reflection of the city lights on the clouded sky turning it a soft golden-pink at the edges and a deep purple at the apex. The zenith of midnight.

The sky over the Atlantic had been blacker than black, while simultaneously full of color, the way the Milky Way swept across it. A dusting of starlight, of loose glitter, with the moon bright and full and clear. No smog, no light pollution. Every crisp pinprick part of an entire solar system, somewhere, out there. Other worlds, invisible now but no less real.

A drunk man, down on the sidewalk below, belted Ella Fitzgerald at the top of his lungs, out-of-tune and stilted.

_Stars shining bright above you..._

Eddie closed his eyes.

_Night breezes seem to whisper I love you..._

He had messed up so many times. Made so many mistakes.

No wonder it had grown to despise him.

The man trailed off into unintelligible humming.

And after the way people spoke of them, how they were together... After spending so much time alone and hearing how people feared Venom, regardless of their actions, no matter who hosted... After the way they treated Eddie when he posed as a savior... (Never mind the fact that he had been left homeless and destitute as payment for his good deeds.)

No wonder he had been so terrified of reconnecting.

It had pushed at his mind so insistently, with such familiarity and such intimacy—he couldn't do it. He couldn't handle it.

But now, years later...

As he looked up at the not-quite-dark night sky, as that song wormed its way into his head...

It wasn't fear or loathing that brought tears to his eyes, alone on the rooftop.

Just sorrow, and the knowledge that he would never feel what they had felt together in those early, early days ever again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cue eddie finding out that the venom symbiote is not with flash anymore but with lee price and being like, essentially, "this is a second chance at redemption, this is a chance to get back what we used to have" (when he was like, fucking, 25 or something)
> 
> sidenote: By early days I mean like, the ending of The Hunger (1996) and the Lethal Protector stuff, when they so clearly reveled in each other's company and in the sensation of being a We rather than an I.
> 
> My end notes were too fucking long so I'm posting them as a second chapter.
> 
>  
> 
> Also yes I did coin a new word for this fic, running with the notion that Eddie probably knows some basic Latin because he's a nerd and a Catholic, and also incredibly Extra—  
> incubi lie upon, and succubi lie beneath... therefore intracubi lie within. 
> 
>  
> 
> So, anyway...  
> If you enjoyed (????) this let me know, I guess...


	2. the author's note

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> yes i really wrote such a hefty end-note that it wouldn't fit in the box.

Are you ready for nearly _1000_ words of notes cause I come bearing a lot of words.  
(i am always on my bullshit, 24/7)

I ended up writing like, half a fucking essay as I worked my way through this fic. So I hope you're ready for my stream-of-consciousness thoughts about sexual assault/consent/violation in the context of symbiosis. (I am 100% not kidding, and if you don't want to read about that then you should stop right here.)

At first I had no ideas but then my brain woke me up at 9 am with the logical conclusion of, "if their relationship was a thinly veiled metaphor for queerness, then his hatred is a metaphor for internalized homophobia"

Then I read the early 2000s Spider-Man comics that encompassed Eddie's cancer arc and BOY, they sure took the symbiote from weird purring alien to malicious force of manipulative cruelty, huh. A lot of this era of Venom mini-arcs kind of poked holes in my original intent because the symbiote really was genuinely written as abusive to Eddie--God knows why, but I'm not gonna sit here and be like, "everything is fine and dandy" cause it DECIDEDLY was not.

You also have to take into consideration the clear parallels drawn (whether intentional or not) to sexual assault when Eddie is unwilling to bond and is forced to do so anyway. Even without taking into account the previous cruelty from this malicious version of the symbiote, that's still very intrusive.

But it also becomes complicated because, as symbiotic aliens, the Klyntar _must_ have a different perception of what autonomy actually is. For all that the closest human parallel to bonding is probably sex, you could also compare that scene—from the symbiote's point of view—to an attempt to return to a comforting place (despite previously supposedly viewing eddie as pathetic and subpar).  
I don't intend on reading the Anti-Venom comics right now, so I'm making assumptions when I say at the point of their attempted re-bond, the symbiote had presumably, up until that moment, been suppressed in Flash's body, and probably missed its most frequent and familiar host. That doesn't make it like... less rape-y... (i know, i'm not supposed to say the word but i'm not gonna call an apple an orange, here) but I think it's important to consider that in the context of these comics--especially with how often hosts are referred to (by themselves or by others) as "home" for their symbiote partners. ("come home")

ETA: Kita makes a great point about this which is that it can also easily be read, more in-line with the symbiote's previous characterization, as--and I quote: "this new host [Flash] is too strong and won't let me do what I want so I'm going to try and return to someone I can more easily manipulate [Eddie]" 

It's genuinely hard to say because there are so many aspects of the symbiote's psyche that are never given explanation. Which isn't inherently a bad thing but can complicate these sorts of readings...

It is also complicated because of the inconsistencies in characterization and the various authors' approaches in term of edginess, in terms of burying (or amplifying) the queerness, etc. etc. etc.—in how some writers have defiantly conflated Venom with a romantic relationship which is explicitly _not_ inherently evil or abusive, and how others use the symbiote as a source of corruption which turns a supposedly righteous Eddie down the path of bad, vs. then again others where the symbiote is corrupted by its host and is itself a victim as well, vs. combinations of all of those. And it all becomes so muddled, too, as discussions of these arcs come up—about whether they even make sense, about the hypocrisy of Anti-Venom being given second chances that Venom never got despite not acting much differently, about what can even be considered _canon_ (when we discuss things like Dark Origin)

And then ALSO; there are, I think, a lot of ways in which the various Venom runs are not entirely compatible, and each feels so disconnected from each one before it...

I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M SAYING ANYMORE  
but whether it's out of character or not is irrelevant at this point: the symbiote trying to re-bond with Eddie, against his will, to the point that he loses consciousness is................ uncomfortable at best.

As an aside: You know what's fucked up to me in that scene? (I haven't read the run but I have read that page) The fact that Flash is more concerned with Eddie's ability as Anti-Venom to save the city than he is with Eddie being terrified to the point of TEARS. That he only takes the symbiote back despite not really ~feeling it~, because Eddie is useful, and not because Eddie is in _significant_ emotional distress. No matter how much Flash considers Eddie to be a "psycho" (up until like, the end of Venom Inc. arguably) it's weird to me that he would see someone in such a state and be so totally unaffected and unbothered. But I guess he's changed since then.

Anyway, frankly, even without the metaphors for queerness, even without comparing such an intimate act as symbiotic bonding to sex, I can't read that or the Toxin bonding scene as anything but violating. I would have to put _effort_ into reading it as anything else. Like, maybe it's because society (and my own safety) requires that I be hyper-aware of these kinds of things, but I cannot disconnect those scenes from outright rape.

I know people try to avoid saying that kind of thing so straightforwardly but... like... look at the Toxin bonding scene in Remender's run. Eddie is naked (entirely so when it actually happens, but wearing underwear in a later flashback), bound, helpless, and completely fucking terrified as he is forced into an inherently physically-and-emotionally intimate act.  
I dunno what to tell you.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

So... anyway... here's me trying to grapple with the self-hatred, the guilt, the violation, and the desire—all that shit makes for a pretty complex and emotionally volatile situation, honestly, and to be quite frank, I'm not sure I'm equipped to do it justice.

But man, I bet my queer theory professors would be proud.  
(God, lemme tell you--as a big ol' queer, I hated that class.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as another aside, having thought about it while I tried and failed to get more than four hours of sleep, I really dislike the poor treatment of mental illness in The Last Temptation specifically.  
> It is... infantilizing, demonizing, and kind of insulting in its shallowness.


End file.
